Boydstun

I'm inclined to side with Gus in opposing such a law as is coming about in Utah, and my concern, as in the example Gus mentioned, is the ability of children to find things out about the world, going around the controls of their parents. It is good to be able to learn more truth. The internet offers that, even if it has also the ability to convey the social-gang emotional damaging that goes on among teenagers. Parents do indeed need to be on the lookout for what their children are encountering, whether their children are in pains over social relations with their peers, whether their children are using drugs, shoplifting, becoming depressed, or getting suicidal. But parents can be on the lookout for those things without the lazy turnkey of controlling, not just monitoring, but upfront blindering of children to wider truth of the world and wider truths being discovered of nature beyond what parents wish them to learn. Preparation of a child for independent life is enhanced, as far as I've observed, by wider and argued views of what the world and we consist of, not by deprivation of that information.

SIDEBAR In his 2016, Greg Salmieri notes that it is curious that Peikoff 1967 does not mention Quine’s “Two Dogmas.” Salmeiri points out some ways the Rand-Peikoff diagnoses of and remedies for the errors in analytic-versus-synthetic doctrines differ from Quine’s. Salmieri understands the later challenge of AvS from Kripke and Putnam to have more in common with the Objectivist challenge, though Putnam differs importantly from Rand on definitions and essences, which looms large in the Objectivist challenge (2016, 304n34, 311n87). Salmieri points to the book-review article, in JARS in 2005, by Roderick Long for thoughts on some relations between Randian theory of meaning and those of Kripke and Putnam. Long’s 2005 review of Greg Browne’s book Necessary Factual Truth was followed a year later by a substantial reply from Browne and rejoinder by Long (JARS V7N1). From May to September of 2007, Prof. Browne engaged in a very generous exchange (his own words coming to about 19,000) in a thread at Objectivist Living* defending the rejection by Peikoff of AvS and defending his own kindred rejection of AvS. Browne had in his arsenal the Kripke-Putnam developments that had been savaging AvS in the years since Peikoff 1967. Browne vigorously countered, in that thread, devotees of Logical Empiricism (and of Popper) who criticized (and poorly understood the revolution afoot, such as in) Peikoff 1967. Late in that thread, Robert Campbell entered it to ask Browne if he had any thoughts on why Peikoff had not addressed the famous Quine paper in his (Peikoff’s) dissertation, which Campbell had lately acquired. Browne had not seen the dissertation and had not much to conjecture on that peculiarity. (Remember, Peikoff 1964 is not written as a champion of Ayn Rand’s philosophic views, but, in an even-handed way, by an author acknowledging his background preference for some rehabilitated sort of logical ontologism and pointing near the end of the dissertation to some of that rehabilitation, such as fresh thinking on the nature of definitions and essence; distance between Quine’s views on logic and on AvS and Randian Peikoff views would not be the reason for no Quine in Peikoff 1964.) I should suggest that Quine, Carnap, Russell, and Wittgenstein raise such a briar patch of technicalities that it was better (and enough for deserving a Ph.D.) to stick with the more accessible and manageable Ayer, Nagel, Dewey, and Lewis to get the dissertation (already more than an armful in history assimilated) finally completed. I'll be digging through the Carnap-Quine briar patch in the next installment of the present study (along with Neo-Kantianism, Logical Empiricism, and of course Kant). *I stopped posting at that site a year ago, when the owner covertly deleted a post of mine partly critical of Donald Trump. ~References~ Browne, G. M. 2001. Necessary Factual Truth. Lanham: University Press of America. Gotthelf, A. and G. Salmieri, editors, 2016. A Companion to Ayn Rand. Wiley Blackwell. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Long, R. T. 2005. Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis? —Review of Brown 2001. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7(1):209–28. Quine, W. V. O. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. 1953. Harvard. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. Meridian. Salmieri, G. 2016. The Objectivist Epistemology. In Gotthelf and Salmieri 2016.

Part 1 Part 2 I expect to complete this study later this year. The result I expect at this point is that evolutionary biology with vegetative teleological causation exhibited as Harry Binswanger does, in physical terms and with that teleological causal cycle framing[1] the efficient causes within the organism, yields for the first time in the history of philosophy, a sound physical basis for Aristotle's final causation in the case of the vegetative actions of living things. This accomplishment renders lost-in-the-woods the persistent criticisms of modern molecular, evolutionary biology as being an eliminative reductionism of quintessential living activity to physical (biochemical) reactions. Those criticisms need to loosen their concept of the physical. Concerning the ramifications for Rand's theory of value, which will come at the end of this paper, I'll have to wait until I've completed the study herein of the full complement of causal mechanisms of life. ([1] "Scaffold" – PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE [2023], 90[5]:1224–33.) This study is of importance to Rand's biocentric theory of value, although I had originally undertaken this work for the sake of getting a good grip on brain computational explanation addressed in Milkowski's EXPLAINING THE COMPUTATIONAL MIND, which had become important to completing my up-to-date assessment of David Kelley's realist theory of perception in THE EVIDENCE OF THE SENSES (1986).* ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INTERLUDE “The seeker comes to the great guru in his mountain fastness and pleads ‘What is Life?’ The sage answers, ‘Life is a fountain’. The supplicant, not surprisingly, is annoyed: ‘I have traveled halfway around the world, spent a fortune, risked my life, and all you can tell me is that life is a fountain?’ ‘All right, my son’, says the guru, ‘for you, Life is not a fountain’.” –The Way of the Cell by F.M. Harold (2001)

Earliest Sub-Canopy Tree – Another Summary – Original Paper

Correction to preceding post: as I understand so far, angiosperms are NOT the types of tree whose fossils are showing the oldest forests. Perhaps pertinent focus should be on Tree Fern, which were earlier than fruit trees (angiosperm) talked of in the Garden of Eden story.

Tad, the picture I'm getting is that when something petrified comes to mind at the word "fossil", it is only by typicality. Like when one thinks of a mouse or rat at the word "rodent". "Fossil" seems to really mean merely the product of minerals replacing living tissue. My Encyclopedia Britannica says that fossilization is process by which the remains or traces of plants or animals are preserved in the earth's crust. I notice that fossils are always sources of information on earlier life forms or sources of energy to people with appropriate background knowledge. However, that does not seem to be part of the definition (by use). On emergence of angiosperms: A, B

@tadmjones Here is an intellectual high-altitude perspective on possibility of superluminal signals, in flat spacetime, without getting into conflict with special relativity in its confines to E-M fields, etc. Although, the paper points to no known physical fields whose differential equations imply causal cones that do not coincide with light speed: Faster than Light? by Robert Geroch (at 13 minutes in this lecture, he speaks of a theorem which, if I understand correctly, rules out the possibility of negative mass in GR which I gather is the situation under which Alcubierre drive would be possible.)

The Brits Are Claiming 390 Million Years Ago, Topping the US 385 Million Years Ago.

Likewise. The great difference in standard of living between rich and middle/poor from the times of Carnegie to our times of Bezos is much publicized. But the rise in standard of living, in market economies, of middle/poor over that interval is where the attention should be, I'd say. I did not like that in Elysium yet another recent futuristic dystopian background for the story was being predicated on overpopulation of the earth. In the first place, it is false that there is not land in the economic sense to support a population 100 times today's were rights-respecting minds left free to investigate and trade. And secondly, it is most galling that stories continue to use overpopulation of earth as fulcrum to the story, when the worried human population growth projections of several decades ago have not occurred. Since 1970 the world population doubled. But with the growth rate now, it is not projected to double again until 200 years from now have passed.

Sight of Superlative Achievement Stephen Boydstun (2007) My favorite character in Atlas Shrugged is John Galt. One of the crucial traits of this character is his extraordinary technical ability. I can adore a fictional character, and part of the reason I adore this one is his possession of that trait. Adoration is one thing, admiration is another. Galt’s technical genius is admirable only in the derivative sense that I would admire that trait in a real person. I cannot admire a fictional character. I can admire the character’s creator as creator, but not the character. Fortunately, there are in our time many individuals whose mathematical and scientific accomplishments are at the high level of the fictional character John Galt. They are not well known to the general public. I want to tell you about one such man. Eli Yablonovitch invented the concept of a photonic band gap. He arrived at this concept in 1987 while doing research on making telecommunication lasers more efficient. Another physicist Sajeev John arrived at the concept independently that same year. John came to the concept in the course of pure research attempting to create light localization. Four years later, Yablonovitch was the first to create a successful photonic band-gap crystal. He used a variant of the crystal structure of diamond, a variant now called yablonovite. The structure was formed by drilling three intersecting arrays of holes, 400 nanometers in diameter, into a block of ceramic material. This structure, at this scale, was able to eliminate the propagation of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range. Photonic band-gap crystals are yielding a new generation of optical fibers capable of carrying much more information, and they are contributing to the realization of nanoscopic lasers and photonic integrated circuits. The name photonic crystal sounds like a crystal made of light. That is incorrect. A photonic crystal is an artificial crystal (or quasicrystal) made usually of solids such as dielectrics or semiconductors. The electrical properties of a semiconductor are intermediate between a dielectric (an insulator) and a conductor. In a dielectric material, the valence electrons of the atoms are tightly bound to them. They are confined to energy levels within the band of levels called the valence band. Above that band of levels is a broad band of energies inaccessible to the electrons under the laws of quantum mechanics. That forbidden band is called the band gap. Above the band gap is a band in which electrons could move freely in the material if only enough energy were applied to them to raise them to that band of energy levels. This band is called the conduction band. In a semiconductor, the valence electrons are less tightly bound to atoms than they are in a dielectric. The band gap is smaller. A smaller boost of energy is needed to induce the flow of electrons, a current. The degree of electrical conductivity of a semiconductor can be precisely controlled by doping one semiconductor chemical element with small amounts of another. When an electron is promoted across the band gap, an effective positive charge called a hole is created in the valence levels below the gap. The holes, like the electrons, can be entrained into currents. By controlling the supply of electrons and holes above and below the band gap, carefully designed semiconductors are able to perform electronic switching, modulating, and logic functions. They can also be contrived to serve as media for photo detectors, solid-state lasers, light-emitting diodes, thermistors, and solar cells. The properties of an electronic band gap depend on the type of atoms and their crystal structure in the solid semiconductor. To comprehend and manipulate the electronic properties of matter, electrons and their alterations must be treated not only in their character as particles, but in their character as quantum-mechanical waves. The interatomic spacing of the atoms in matter is right for wave-interference effects among electrons. This circumstance yields the electronic band gaps in semiconductors as well as the conductive ability of conductors. A photonic band gap is a range of energies of electromagnetic waves for which their propagation through the crystal is forbidden in every direction. The interatomic spacing in semiconductors are on the order of a few tenths of a nanometer, and that is too small for effecting photonic band gaps in the visible, infrared, microwave, or radio ranges of the spectrum. Creation of photonic band gaps for these very useful wavelengths requires spatial organizations in matter at scales on the order of a few hundred nanometers and above. In the 70’s and 80’s, researchers had been forming, in semiconductors, structures called superlattices. These were periodic variations in semiconductor composition in which repetitions were at scales a few times larger than the repetitions in the atomic lattice. The variations could consist of alternating layers of two types of semiconductors or in cyclic variations in the amount of selected impurities in a single type of semiconductor. These artificial lattices allowed designers, guided by the quantum theory of solids, to create new types of electronic band gaps and new opticoelectronic properties in semiconductors. Photonic crystals are superlattices in which the repeating variation is a variation in the refractive index of the medium. It is by refractions and internal partial reflections that photonic band gaps are created. The array of holes that Yablonovitch and his associates drilled for the first photonic crystal formed a superlattice of air in the surrounding dielectric solid. Additional workable forms of photonic-crystal superlattice have been demonstrated since that first one. Costas Soukoulis and colleagues created a crystal of crisscrossed rods, and it has yielded photonic band gaps in the infrared part of the spectrum. Photonic crystals have been created mostly in dielectric or semiconductor media, but Shawn Yu Lin and associates have created them in tungsten. These may prove useful in telecommunications and in the conversion of infrared radiation into electricity. In 2001 Eli Yablonovitch co-founded the company Luxtera, which is now a leading commercial developer of silicon photonic products. Photonic crystals, manipulators of light, they are alive “because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power—of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form.” –AR 1957 (re diesel-electric) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Scientific American 1983 (Nov) “Solid-State Superlattices” –G.H. Dohler 1984 (Aug) “Quasicrystals” –D.R. Nelson 1986 (Oct) “Photonic Materials” –J.M. Rowell 1991 (Nov) “Microlasers” –J.L. Jewell, J.P. Harbison, and A. Scherer 1998 (Mar) “Nanolasers” –P.L. Gourley 2001 (Dec) “Photonic Crystals: Semiconductors of Light” –E. Yablonovitch 2007 (Feb) “Making Silicon Lase” –B. Jalali Science News 1991 (Nov 2) “Drilling Holes to Keep Photons in the Dark” –I. Peterson 1993 (Sep 25) “A Novel Architecture for Excluding Photons” –I. Peterson 1996 (Nov 16) “Light Gets the Bends in a Photonic Crystal” –C. Wu 1998 (Oct 24) “Crystal Bends Light Hard, Saves Space” –P. Weiss 2003 (Oct 4) “Hot Crystal” –P. Weiss 2005 (Nov 5) “Light Pedaling” –P. Weiss Nature Photonics 2007 (1:91–92) “Bandgap Engineering: Quasicrystals Enter Third Dimension” –C.T. Chan Fundamental Papers – Physical Review Letters 1987 (May 18) “Inhibited Spontaneous Emission in Solid-State Physics and Electronics” –E. Yablonovitch 1987 (Jun 8 ) “Strong Localization of Photons in Certain Disordered Dielectric Superlattices” –S. John 1989 (Oct 30) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case” –E. Yablonovitch and T.M. Gmitter 1990 (Nov 19) “Full Vector Wave Calculation of Photonic Band Structures in Face-Centered-Cubic Dielectric Media” –K.M. Leung and Y.F. Liu 1990 (Nov 19) “Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures: Bloch Wave Solution of Maxwell’s Equations” –Z. Zhang and S. Satpathy 1990 (Dec 17) “Existence of a Photonic Gap in Periodic Dielectric Structures” –K.M. Ho, C.T. Chan, and C.M. Soukoulis 1991 (Oct 21) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case Employing Non-Spherical Atoms” –E. Yablonovitch, T.J. Gmitter, and K.M. Leung

Even were your accomplishments (not to be confused with your general drifts and aspirations) what you claim and presumably what you think you know, why ever would one want to leave this glorious earth and companion life here. The trush were singing out back waking me this morning. Human steps right on earth can travel unlimited roads if we love these steps and don't pretend we can get around them. I've had a much better quality of life than King Henry VIII. Not due to "recreational drugs," but the regular, amazing medicines of today. Also, due to music on CD's and the internal combustion engine and this electronic means of communication. Yes, there is still human failure, such as those who do not love their mind (and life and the lives of others) enough to stay away from recreational drugs. Leave them, not Earth and the glory on it. The humans going away with you are going to have none of what you want to get away from here on earth? Seek out the good here (e.g. next post).

Emigration of Belarusian and Russian Academics and Institutions

Elysium

Deutsche Welle If Assange is extradited to the US, I predict that if he dies before trial, it will be by natural causes, not by the Devil or the Deep State. Should he live and go on trial, I think the arguments on both sides of the case will be extremely important. If convicted, the case might well be appealed for constitutional issues. If convicted, as was Manning, the President could then, as with Manning, commute the sentence if the Administration thought the penalty too harsh. Perhaps there is worth to the US for cooperation from Assange (I don't know if there is any), and by that route also the sentence of Assange could be lenient. Compassionate release from prison is also a possibility if convicted and sentenced to prison. But cf. Madoff. Afghanistan "War Logs"

On 25 July 2010, WikiLeaks released to The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel over 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009. The documents detail individual incidents including friendly fire and civilian casualties. The scale of the leak was described by Julian Assange as comparable to that of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s. The documents were released to the public on 25 July 2010. On 29 July 2010 WikiLeaks added a 1.4 GB "insurance file" to the Afghan War Diary page, whose decryption details some speculation would be released if WikiLeaks or Assange were harmed. About 15,000 of the 92,000 documents have not yet been released on WikiLeaks, as the group is currently reviewing the documents to remove some of the sources of the information. Speaking to a group in London in August 2010, Assange said that the group will "absolutely" release the remaining documents. He stated that WikiLeaks has requested help from the Pentagon and human-rights groups to help redact the names, but has not received any assistance. He also stated that WikiLeaks is "not obligated to protect other people's sources...unless it is from unjust retribution." WikiLeaks' leaking of classified U.S. intelligence has been described by commentator of The Wall Street Journal as having "endangered the lives of Afghan informants" and "the dozens of Afghan civilians named in the document dump as U.S. military informants. Their lives, as well as those of their entire families, are now at terrible risk of Taliban reprisal." When interviewed, Assange stated that WikiLeaks has withheld some 15,000 documents that identify informants to avoid putting their lives at risk. Specifically, Voice of America reported in August 2010 that Assange, responding to such criticisms, stated that the 15,000 still held documents are being reviewed "line by line," and that the names of "innocent parties who are under reasonable threat" will be removed. Greg Gutfeld of Fox News described the leaking as "WikiLeaks' Crusade Against the U.S. Military." ACLU urges DOJ to drop charges.

I have decided to not write additional poems beyond what I have made and gathered in the collection linked in the preceding post. I am contented with those, and I'll work only on completing my essays for the duration. I read the final two poems I wrote here.

As opposed to slow-walking the decision to hear the appeal on absolute immunity for ex-presidents, the Supreme Court could very well have been in an interval of trying get enough Justices to agree to hear the appeal from the appellate court decision and opinion, with some Justices initially undecided and open to persuasion. We don't know. But Gus neglects comparison of the speed of the Supreme Court (and them slowing things down by earlier throwing the appeal back to the DC appellate court for decision) with the Supreme Court speed in the Nixon case* and in the Bush v. Gore case. Unless the Court gives their decision in this coming week, it will look very like the political-party alignment of the Court in Bush v. Gore. Delaying until end of June to give their decision and opinions could very well say all Yes to the lengthy opinion of the lower appellate court, say that ex-Presidents are not immune from criminal prosecution, while, having slow-walked the time-sensitive case, made the ruling de facto inapplicable to the one case that has ever come up. (Although, I must admit, it is not clear that most American voters would not vote for Trump even knowing that he was convicted in the pending criminal cases. I've apparently in the past credited the American people with too much valuation that America be a constitutional democratic republic. Now they just deny it ever was such a thing, rationalizing their own instigation of its downfall.) On the slowness of the prosecution bringing the DC case and the Georgia case, that could easily be a matter of the time needed to gather sufficient evidence to have a high chance for conviction, even when the accused is a rich litigant and a former President.

I'm going to try to make one of those @necrovore. Well, I'll be. It's that easy. I don't have anything to say in this post. Just figuring out how y'all do that.

Yours is only ONE conception of what a forum must be or should be. There is nothing in the technology requiring that model, and any conventions about it were born yesterday and should anyway be rattled with experimentation. Over at Objectivist Living, the owner openly restricted content to: do not criticize Nathaniel or Barbara Branden. In the later years, he had the covert content restriction: do not criticize Donald Trump. It's still a forum. The highly content-restricted forums (FB Groups) named "Ayn Rand Group" and "Leonard Peikoff Appreciation Group" are still forums. An electronic forum could have all the topic-restrictions and scholarly-level requirements I put on the Objectivity journal and it could have management such as the absolute monarchy as I did it there, and it would still be a forum. And it might be a useful forum for some writers and readers because of those considerable restrictions on content. The Comments section of online magazines are also forums. In the case of Philosophy Now, the owners have adopted a sufficiently hands-off policy that anything favorable to Ayn Rand or even accurately representing Rand will be met with vicious personal attack on the commenter as ignorant and idiot. The management allows that routine dynamic, and they evidently get the participants and product suited to their project.

A forum can be run however the owners want to run it. There will be consequences in who wants to participate or read, but that's it. Owners can monitor as little or much as they please. There are forums within Facebook for which each post is monitored and each thread-origination has to be pre-approved. That's fine, and the owners will get satisfaction (or not) from who all participates and what sort of things bloomed in the forum they created. One thing about forums (at least ones of any interest to me) is a circumstance not set by the owners: It is written language. There are choices set by the owners (ultimately) that are firm constraints on participants, such as time limits on editing a post or eliminating your post. I created, published, and edited the hard-copy journal Objectivity for eight years. My choices of constraints on it were simply my design for it. The options open to the designer are really very wide; there can be many variations of such options while still counting as a journal. Similarly, it goes for a forum such as this one. Constraints I laid on Objectivity* included: no political or cultural topics or commentaries. No basement or garage science or kook science; only standard science (mostly physics and developmental psychology). No advertisements. Writers had to go through an iterative process with the editor on addressing in the content any pertinent external literature, and there was always a lot, of which the writer knew little at the outset. I did not agree entirely with everything in any compositions not authored by me (and I often came to disagree with things in my own compositions in later years). I was pleased with the quality of the production. It was a worthwhile, challenging project. For my efforts, I prefer these later years to simply write for venues others have set up. I appreciate this one and the intelligence and background training showing here in writings of its participants.

Tad, that post is only an update addition to the information in this thread and a review of the history (when you scroll down in that link). I think you need to get in mind a wider and longer view of diasporas (black Americans and young men drafted during the American war in Vietnam) within the US and from the US to Canada and raise concern over the actual, physical, life-or-death concretes as in sharp distinction to the metaphorical and the myth-making of politicians du jour. Sell everything for tickets, get your family on the Katy, and get out. Exodus to Canada

US State Department Missions for Belarus – from 2022 forward

Earth's Oldest Forest

Apparently, another objective of the black men who took over the train was to try to intercept another lynch-posse in the area out to get a negro for another recent killing of a white woman. As far as I’ve been able to find, no violence occurred in Caddo or Durant as the train passed. Many black residents of those towns quit those towns immediately on that occasion. I’ve not found that any black residents of Caddo heeded the “order” of the Klan to leave. In a couple more weeks, however, all black residents of Caddo and outward a radius of three miles did uproot and leave the area forever. I’d like to interject that it was apparently not only southern and eastern Oklahoma that was teetering on an all-out race war in those days, with very frequent mob violence at hand. It was evidently the same in north Texas. Black suspects were taken from law enforcement by mobs there also and burned at the stake (before the like case in Purcell, OK.) White youths toured black residential areas shooting any negro they saw in one Texas episode. The circumstances by which Caddo became a town of only whites and Choctaw are these: Note that dynamite was readily available, as it was used for railroad work and for “fishing”. A white farmer from Caddo, Horace Gribble, was killed 2 September 1911 in an exchange of gunfire between nine white men in the black neighborhood outside the home of the black family Daniels. Two of the Gribble party showed up to law enforcement and claimed that they had been passing the Daniels house when they were fired upon. Two black men a Daniels and Will Stevens were placed under arrest. They did not resist, and the sheriff spirited them safely out of the county to avoid muster of a mob. From the black men, the story was that the white party had been shooting in the neighborhood and had thrown a stick of dynamite at the Daniel home, which did not proceed all the way to full explosion, and the men in the home (women and children also at home) fired upon the attackers. The city Marshall found dynamite at the home, was inclined to believe the whites had started this, and arrested the two known of the party of nine. Meanwhile as word of the fatality spread, there was an overnight exodus of all black families from Caddo. They caught Katy trains northbound or southbound. The Katy added cars. Cattle, hogs, and crops of the negroes were sold at absurdly low prices. A large crowd of whites assembled at the station to cheer over each departing train. Passengers on the trains waved goodbye. I read one notice of tears on some black faces at the station, now driven out by terror from the only home they had ever known. Versions of these events appeared in newspapers across the country. I don’t recall any of them being told in my high school Oklahoma history book in the 1960’s. Filling the labor gap in Caddo was urgent. Some creditors were left in the lurch. The public-visibility heights of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the region seems to have been 1921–24. Large parades and assemblies to cheering white crowds, you know. In Caddo, after the exodus, there was no more violence-work for the Klan. They popped into churches, bringing cash donations and words for the minister to read (which gladly those pulpits professed anyway) of how Christian were the ideals and services of the Klan, those being the ideals (some were deviations and diversions from practice): Protestantism, sanctity of woman, law-bound justice, free speech and assembly, separation of state and church, racial segregation, white supremacy, and singing “America”.

Tomorrow is the last day of Black History Month 2024, and I’d like to share a bit of black history in a space of America I was familiar with as a child. I recall as a small child being on the wrap-around porch of my aunt who lived in Caddo, Oklahoma. This is in southeastern OK, not too far from the Red River and Lake Texoma. She and my father were reminiscing. They spoke of the time their Uncle John had jumped a N . . . who was trying to steal a hog of John's. Uncle John slit the man's throat. "Near cut his head off, they said." John was a big guy and had been a Roughrider. So far I've not found whether anything legal was put in motion over this incident. I've gathered that racial hatred and fear of Black people (men especially) had crescendoed down there just before and during the childhood of my father (b. 1917). Our family lived just outside OKC. During my early childhood, in the 1950’s, I was often with relatives down in Caddo. From my memory, it would have been strange to have ever seen a Black person in that town. Yet decades later, thanks to the internet, I read in an old newspaper, from earlier in the century than birth of my father, of a Black-owned and operated retail store (groceries I think) in town. I imagine it was for Black customers. Story with it in it had come up in an incident against the owner/operator who lived above the store. One night a White guy broke in and lit a stick of dynamite in the store in the corner above which was normally the location of the owner's bed. By sheer luck, the owner had rearranged a week before, and his bed was that night in the opposite corner. He closed the store, and left town. My parents were born and raised on farms near the town of Caddo. The town was named after the Caddo tribe who had earlier been natives of the area. The town began as a rail depot (1872) in the Choctaw Nation within Indian Territory. The rails were lain by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway. Initially the town was a tent city. Box cars were used for freight storage until a depot building could be constructed. A sudden influx of white people and some black people occurred at that time: tenant farmers, coal miners, railroad workers, cowboys, and merchants. Whites quickly outnumbered Choctaw in this area. Law and order in Indian Territory among white Americans was near zero. It was hideout territory to many gunmen. U.S. Marshals worked for fees only, which they lost if their prisoner died on the way to court. Bogus arrests were pervasive. Not rule of law. The Indian tribes tried to provide the rule of law for their own members. In the early years of Caddo, the region was still Choctaw Nation, and treaties had to be honored in all developments undertaken in the region. The dealings of the railroads were with Choctaw tribal officials. The railroad improved the transportation of cattle, grains, and cotton. Locomotives and sawmills were by coal-fired steam engines. Newspapers were established very soon. I have seen in old newspapers advertisements addressed to Negroes of the South to migrate on over to Indian Territory. The Caddo area was advertised as having rich soil, plenty of work, schools within walking distance (if you have a horse, I’d say!), and a mild climate (Ha! Hot!). Freedmen (from Choctaw slaveholders) still resided in the area already. Businesses and churches came on quickly. I’m pretty sure there was plenty of sin. I mentioned that as a child in the 1950’s, I don’t recall any black people being in Caddo. Recently I have learned, thanks to Mary Maurer’s GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN – A HISTORY OF THE BLACK FAMILIES OF CADDO 1872–1911, where the black people had lived. It was across the railroad tracks. The town is at the intersection, in my times, of two main paved roads, and one of them runs along the railroad. I don’t recall anything across the tracks except the cemetery Gethsemane and then farms and their homes on and on. An older eye might have seen more right there across the tracks even in my time, and have known what had been. Actual emancipation of slaves in Indian Territory did not come until 3 years after the end of the Civil War. The Five Civilized Tribes had sided with the Confederacy. A peace treaty with them and the US government was reached in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The treaty stipulated that freedmen receive allotments of land and membership in the tribe. Choctaws and Chickasaws balked at the idea, but eventually (I don’t know when) many freedmen received an allotment of 40 to 160 acres. Choctaws and Chickasaws wanted black people moved out of the two nations. The Choctaws eventually granted citizenship to many of their freedmen. None (of the nearly 5000 from the Chickasaw) were ever adopted into the Chickasaw Nation. Choctaws did not provide education directly for freedmen; they provided education for former slaves through missionary organizations with funds from the federal government for teachers and supplies. The freedmen supplied the building. The first such school was run by the Baptist Mission Board, which opened at Bogey Depot (now a ghost town about 25 miles north of Caddo) in 1874. In the 1870’s, Caddo got so civilized as to build a jail and establish a cemetery. The Oddfellows Lodge and Masonic Lodge were large contributors in getting the cemetery. My ancestors are buried there at Gethsemane, including my mother. I’ve noticed Choctaw names there such as the Maytubby family (one was a code talker in WWI). Statehood of Oklahoma began in 1907. In 1910, the state legislature (Democrats) had passed the “grandfather act” keeping a literacy requirement on Oklahoma black men for eligibility to vote, while removing the requirement for white men. (Native Americans were not allowed to become U.S. Citizens until 1924. Yet there were Choctaw code talkers in the U.S. Army in WWI ! Women were not allowed to vote until 1919.) The Caddo high school graduating class of 1911 had five students. One of them was a sister of my grandfather Boydstun. I have a faint memory of her from early childhood in the 1950’s, when she was elderly and residing in Durant, a larger town south of Caddo. She was crucial in preserving a lot of history of the area and of our family. Durant is home of a State college called Southeastern. In the era of my youth, it was known as the campus of a thousand magnolias. I’ve noticed from old newspaper photos that a lot of extremely attractive Choctaw women were in attendance there. Today Durant is also home of the Choctaw Nation headquarters (a corporation if I’m not mistaken) and home to the Choctaw Casino and Resort. On Independence Day of 1911, newspapers report, shops closed and many residents headed over to Blue River to cool off. When I was a child, everyone referred to that beautiful river simply as Blue. My father was baptized in it when he was 17. (He got baptized again later when, set to marry his second wife, he became high church.) For a year, publications had been discussing “the negro question”. A major newspaper out of OKC contained a piece on taxing and voting that included: “THE NEGRO QUESTION IN OKLAHOMA IS DEVELOPING A CRISIS. It is no longer presented in the form of theory, but as a grave condition. Unless the Negro is restricted, he will soon become a menace.” Caddo originally had over 200 black residents, mostly freed slaves of the tribes. Some of the women worked in prosperous white homes as cooks or nannies. Others took in laundry or worked in the fields. Men farmed as tenants, and some had specific skills for hire. Farmers in that vicinity raised mostly corn, oats, and cotton. In a dry year, corn will not make, but oats may still come through. The Kentucky LEXINGTON HERALD, August 15, 1911, had a story headlined “Race War Threatened in Oklahoma Towns” “Negroes Warned to Leave Caddo Following Murder of Another Woman” “Blacks Take Train” The assault against Mrs. Campbell, in Durant, included a gunshot wound of the woman eventuating in her death. While she still lived, a posse formed swiftly from all over the county, soon found and cornered the armed suspect and riddled his body with bullets. The body was taken back to Durant where Mrs. Campbell positively identified him as her assailant. A large assembly of men from all over the county built “a huge bonfire on which they threw the body of the negro, burning it to a crisp. Many spectators secured parts of the charred body as souvenirs.” CADDO HERALD, August 18, 1911 (Versions of this story appeared across the nation from MA to CA.) The identity of the man is unknown. (On August 24, at the Oklahoma town of Purcell, a black man suspected in a similar crime against a white woman was killed by being burned alive, to a crisp, while a crowd of 3,000 gleeful men, women, and girls applauded every move of the white men performing the execution. The only two law enforcement officers of the town, who had attempted to save the man’s life, had been locked up in the “booze room” of the courthouse. The name of the man so viciously and lawlessly executed is Pete Carter. –The Daily Oklahoman) Learning of the slaying of the accused man at Durant, some black men of Caddo began talking of revenge. The Kaddo Klan posted notices giving negroes of Caddo one week to leave. The membership of the Klan there was large. Later one member pleaded guilty to posting some of the notices, and he was fined $10. Meanwhile over in Atoka, which was evidently at that time almost entirely a black town, men were enraged at the posse killing and burning of the black man at Durant. They organized and when the MKT freight train came through, they put their guns on the trainmen and took charge. The conductor managed to send warnings to Durant and Caddo. And in those towns, nearly every man in town was armed and awaiting the arrival of the avengers. (To be continued, drectly)